Nokia to Deliver Maps to iPhone, Android, and Web

Nokia has fallen far from its one-time perch atop the mobile industry, but the struggling firm has continued nurturing one key advantage over the competition: its superior mapping and location technologies. And this week, Nokia announced that it will broaden the reach of these technologies and open them up to users on rival platforms via a new service called HERE.

“People want great maps, and with HERE we can bring together Nokia's location offering to [give] people a better way to explore, discover, and share their world,” Nokia President and CEO Stephen Elop said Tuesday. “Additionally, with HERE, we can extend our 20 years of location expertise to new devices and operating systems that reach beyond Nokia. As a result, we believe that more people benefit from and contribute to our leading mapping and location service.”

Nokia describes HERE as the first “location cloud service,” one that will deliver personalized mapping and location services to users on multiple mobile platforms and via the web. And despite the firm’s overly reliant partnership with Microsoft on devices—or perhaps because of it—this time, it's working with other platforms and partners.

Nokia will bring HERE first to Apple’s iOS—iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad—before moving it to other platforms, including Android. It is working with Mozilla to integrate HERE into that company’s Firefox OS via a new mobile web experience. And Nokia is purchasing Earthmine to integrate its reality capture and processing technologies into HERE to boost the service’s 3D map-making capabilities.

It’s hard to look at Nokia’s moves and not believe that this is in some ways a fallback plan should its migration to Windows Phone not work out. Nokia’s future could very well be as a much smaller firm that supplies superior mapping and location services to all mobile platforms, and the web, and not a maker of mobile handsets. That said, it’s unclear how it intends to make money on what is now a free service.

About time Nokia opened itself up to more that just Windows Phone for the future. With their agreement with Microsoft, Nokia was probably somewhat limited in what it could do, but my guess is there are no such limitations or restrictions on what it can do with is Apps. If Nokia can really make a good Map service (better than Anroid maps) make it standalone (cacheable maps for complete trip ) like it's other map services and sell it for a reasonable price (say about $20 or so a year including updates) it may have a product that enough people want that it could become the defacto mapping product for a lot of folks. Pricing will be important because if they price it too high, people will just stick with what comes on their platform and Nokia won't make anything.
Nokia could then be seen as an Application provider and probably use what innovation it has left to enter into other Applications on these same expanded platforms. Sad that Nokia has waited this long to make this announcement. I think they thought Windows Phone (7 and 8) was really going to turn things around for them, but seems like someone (not sure it was Elop) has finally figured out they better have other options (one of which should also included resurrecting Meego or jumping on board with one of the other startup mobile OSes such as Firefox OS ).